Come to terms with it. Yesterday’s generation gap has morphed into today’s generation gulf. Think about when you were in school. There were no cell phones, no active shooter drills, and no social media. To discover the meaning of the word "intuitive," you had to actually open a hardbound copy of the dictionary. Let me save you the trouble of looking it up. In comparison with the current generation, you are not intuitive.
When I make a presentation at a school security conference, I ask administrators that have Facebook accounts to raise their hands. More than half of the audience does. When I ask for a volunteer to explain specific facebook security settings, all hands drop. A tone of discomfort begins to surface in the room. Next, I ask how many attendees have Twitter accounts. Less than half of the audience does. I attempt to explain the mass notification value of Twitter. In addition to discomfort, a tone of defiance rises.
Lack of understanding and fear of the unknown can drive people into isolation. That kind of isolation sits squarely in the center of today’s generation gulf. What is the remedy? How can the separation be bridged? Answering these questions may be a real key to providing a safe learning environment.
Now is the time for collaboration. Now is the time for education. Now is the time to shrink the gulf. Consider the following excerpt from the first chapter of my new book entitled, "School Security: How to Build and Strengthen a School Safety Program."
Today’s Student
Reorient your perspective on school security. Schools are different today. Students are different. Anxiety among the student population is increasing. “The average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950’s,” wrote Dr. Robert L. Leahy in a 2008 "Psychology Today" article. A higher level of anxiety translates into a higher level of risk. Today’s students face new threats. Social media risks abound. Never before have students been more connected and more isolated. The Pew Research Center reported in February 2014 that Facebook was used by 73 percent of US teens aged 12–17. In March 2013, the Pew Research Center found that 78 percent of that age group had a cell phone, almost half (47 percent) of which were smartphones. That translates into 37 percent of all teens who have smartphones, up from just 23 percent in 2011. The prevalence of social media and handheld electronic devices has introduced unprecedented, immediate, and far-reaching problems. Consider the following statistics from the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Over the past five years, young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6:21 to 7:38—almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five. Moreover, given the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time, today’s youth pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those daily seven and a half hours—an increase of almost two and a quarter hours of media exposure per day over the past five years.” The Kaiser Family Foundation released these findings in 2010. Can there be any question that the numbers have grown significantly since?
Issues that Students Face: Immediacy
For generations, students have cared too much about social standing relative to their peers. They will go to great lengths to avoid feeling inferior. The pressure to compete socially is nothing new, but the battlefield has changed dramatically. Just a few short years ago, the drive to “keep up” was expressed in terms of hardware. Students wanted the latest phone, the latest music player, and the latest television. In today’s world, the technology arms race is expressed in terms of software. A constant wave of new apps that can be downloaded immediately over Wi-Fi to your phone, tablet, or iPod makes it nearly impossible to compete with peers. Impossibility does not seem to deter students. They simply live in a different, faster world. Students’ lives are ruled by immediacy. When something exciting happens to a student, the first response is to document it. A photo/video is taken and shared, a status is posted, and texts are sent. The moment itself is not fully appreciated until the student’s ecosystem of social networks is made aware of it. The moment itself is not truly a success until it is “liked” and “favorited.” This may seem strange and foreign to adults, but it is simply a reality for today’s students. Teachers and administrators would love for all students to put their phones away and pay attention at all times. We have reached a point where that expectation is no longer realistic.
Issues that Students Face: Single-Tasking
The current generation of students may be the best multitaskers to have ever walked the planet. Stop and observe students in their daily routine. They are reading e-mails while they are watching TV. They are responding to a party invite while they are ordering lunch. When students are talking to you, they are probably talking to someone else, too. Today’s generation multi-tasks with ease because they are programmed that way. Prohibiting students from multi-tasking in a classroom setting presents a significant challenge. The traditional classroom environment is designed for single-tasking. Teachers face significant obstacles in attempting to address this tension. They face a room full of students that have full-time access to any form of entertainment they could possibly imagine and, at the same time, must focus the attention of those students on a single subject, such as biology, for an entire class period. Many people have framed the discussion of multi-tasking as an addiction. While that may be a bit extreme, the concept may make sense. Students need to be doing something while they are doing something. Their output will likely suffer if they do not.
Issues that Students Face – Permanence
Today’s students are famous. They are very similar to the A-list movie stars seen on television and in magazines. Students get photographed nearly every day; their pictures are posted online and discussed by many different people. While this reality may not fall under the traditional definition of fame, consider the similarities. Students are treated like celebrities. In the past, compliments and insults were special. They were initially expressed and, after that, the specific comments were remembered only through memory. Today’s compliments and insults are permanent. Prior to the advent of social media, a student might have heard that a classmate said that she thought he was cute. Now, that information is posted on an Instagram page. Prior to the advent of social media, if a student dropped her lunch tray in the cafeteria, students in the immediate vicinity laughed. Now, a video of the incident gets posted on YouTube for all to see just moments after it occurs. Students have learned the reality of permanence, and they live their lives in anticipation of it. They almost act as their own publicists. Students must think about the ramifications of certain actions and consider, ahead of time, how those actions might be received. They get dressed with this in mind, they order lunch with this in mind, and they interact with their friends with this in mind.
It seems that every day there’s a new story about a security lapse, emergency lockdown, or violent act taking place at a school somewhere in the United States. Today it’s simply inexcusable not to have adequate security measures in place regardless of how safe you think your community may be. In School Security, I explain how to make your institution a safer place to learn with easy-to-follow steps.
The book emphasizes a proactive rather than reactive approach to school security. Readers are introduced to basic loss prevention and safety concepts, including how to communicate safety information to students and staff, how to raise security awareness, and how to prepare for emergencies. I also discuss how to positively influence student behavior, lead staff training programs, and write sound security policies. An entire chapter is dedicated to describing what school security resources are available for follow-up reading and further training. School Security isn’t just a book for security professionals: it helps people without formal security training - namely, educators and school administrators - effectively address school risk.
Click here for more information about the book.
